There is an opposition, apparently, between the knower and the known. And so we talk about “facing” reality. We talk about “coming into” this world—as if somehow we didn’t belong, as if instead of being leaves growing out of a tree we were a lot of birds that had alighted on bare branches.
There is, as yet, no really serious program at the government level to do anything radical about the pollution of water, the waste of water, the pollution of air, and the general ravaging of the United States of America. I’m amazed that congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.
Because what you really are as a body, as a living organism, is not some sort of separate existence coated by a skin which divides you from the rest of the world. Shakespeare has King John saying to Hubert: “Within this wall of flesh there is a soul counts thee her creditor.” “Within this wall of flesh:” the skin considered as a barrier, when actually, from a biological point of view, the human skin and all skins are osmotic membranes. You know, when you get something by osmosis, by sort of soaking it in. So, in the same way, one’s skin is a spongy construction full of holes. Full of communicators; nerve ends. And your skin is simply a vibrating membrane through which the so-called external world flows into you and through you. So that you yourself, actually, are not so much an entity that moves around in an environment, you are much more like a whirlpool in a stream. And, as you know, the whirlpool is constant only in its doing—that is to say, in its whirling. And you could recognize individual whirligigs in a stream. But the water is flowing through them all the time. They are never the same for a second. And so it is also with us.
Imagine, for example, a university: the student body, undergraduate, changes every four years. The faculty changes every so often. The buildings keep changing more and more. What constitutes the University of California? It certainly isn’t the faculty, it isn’t the students, it isn’t the governors, it isn’t the administration, it isn’t the buildings. What is it? Why, a doing! A behavior. A university-ing process of study and experiment and so on. So it is exactly the same with you. You flow. You are a process.
Organisms don’t have bosses. They are essentially, I would say, democratic arrangements where—somehow, in a marvelous way—an enormous company of cells are working together.
Fascinating thing about bees and flowers is: they are very different looking things. A flower sits still and blooms and it smells—or stinks, to be correct. The bee moves about and buzzes. But they are all one organism. You don’t find flowers without bees, you don’t find bees without flowers. They are just as much one as your head and your feet, which also look very different.
This planet, this solar system, this galaxy is people-ing in exactly the same way that an apple tree apples.
One of the reasons why we make such a mess with technology is that the shareholders in any given corporation want to make a fast buck. Now, there’s nothing wrong, you see, in wanting to be rich. There’s nothing at all wrong in being rich. In fact, I think the world without rich people would be extraordinarily boring. The point is, you have to understand what riches are. And they are not money. Riches are land, clothes, food, housings, intelligence, energy, skill, iron, forests, gardens. Those are riches. But when you’re concentrating, you see, only on making the buck, it doesn’t occur to you that you’re not really getting rich, you’re just impoverishing yourself.
The problem, then, is this: that, when people preach moral behavior, and then—out of a sense of guilt or out of a sense of fear—people try to be good (that is to say, to do those things that are preached), all it does is it turns them into hypocrites. Preaching is a hypocrisy-creating institution in that sense, because it does not transform the consciousness of the individual. If, by any chance, consciousness could be so transformed that one is no longer felt as a separate ego, then you would not have to be so egotistic. If there is a way, in other words, of generating love within human beings as a kind of constant attitude to the environment, that is going to be far more effective in bringing about unselfish behavior than anything else. Well, that’s our problem, you see? To do just that. And no amount of talk is going to do it. Because it depends on something more happening than merely understanding words, or even seeing the theoretical reasonableness of certain lines of conduct. We need a bomb under us, rather than intellectual persuasion.
See, you’re just doing the same old thing again. You ask me how to be unselfish. But what is your reason for wanting to be unselfish? You don’t want to be unselfish at all! You want to find a new way of getting around it all!
It’s not enough to have a way-out experience and come back and say to your friends, “Man, it was a gas!” Because it is immemorial wisdom that everybody who takes a heroic journey must bring something back—because if he doesn’t, nobody knows he’s taken it. He may have lied, he may just have said that he went to the land of the demons and fought with the dragons, and then crossed the perilous bridge and came into the fairy palace. Bring back a fairy’s feather! Prove it!
To the extent that you completely accept the dissolution of everything into dust—that, by doing that, you let go of that clinging (to permanence, to yourself, to security) which releases all the energies of life. The formula, then, is: to the degree that you are willing to become dust, to that degree you are alive.
Human beings need religion, are starved for it, and the churches have not delivered. They have not delivered the experience; therefore, alternatives are being explored. It’s quite natural.
Nothing in the way of a skill will be achieved without practice. But if practice is strained, still nothing will be achieved by it—except resentment.
Death is not a disease. Death is very healthy, just as childbirth is. Everybody has to die. You can’t possibly call it a disease. You may die as a result of a disease, or of an accident, or anything, but death itself is not a disease. It is simply the other end of life, opposite birth. And instead of regarding it as something to be put off and simply really disregarded, death is something for which one should train oneself as a very valuable experience, because death is the automatic taking away of all your attempts to cling onto life. All that frightened clutch is simply going to be broken. Well, it’s pretty rough to have it broken. Why don’t you let go first? So in that case, then, when somebody is about to die, instead of the friends and relations coming around and consoling him and saying, “You’re going to be alright,” they come around instead and say “Wowee! This is the great moment for you,” you know? Here is the colossal opportunity for you to realize who you really are. Because all that you thought you were is going to disappear. What do you suppose is going to be left? So you can have your choice—in my ideal sanitarium for the dying—in the way you want to die: whether you want to die in a religious way with candles and priests and chants and meditations, or whether you want to die with an enormous and glorious champagne party. The principle is pretty much the same. Do you really let yourself go? Do you cooperate with what nature is doing in you? Nature is giving you, by death, the opportunity to let go of all this nonsense.